


A Proper Education

by ishafel



Category: Highlander
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-26
Updated: 2010-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-14 03:24:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Those who can, teach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Proper Education

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lferion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lferion/gifts).



“Kings die. Cattle die. Word-fame is forever,” Methos says. “Who wrote this? Anyone? James?”

Blank stares, most of them. A couple of them typing frantically, trying to look it up, maybe. Screwing around on Facebook, maybe. James knows the answer, but is too pathologically shy to say it out loud.

“Right.” Twenty minutes into Freshman Comp., Monday-Wednesday-Friday from 8 a.m. to 8:50, and Methos already wishes he were dead. “Viking proverb. Source unknown. I'm going to let you all in on a secret.” He lowers his voice, and they look up, aware that something has changed. Methos slams both palms down, hard, on the lectern.

“Everything,” he screams. “Every word I say, every word in every book I assign, all of it WILL BE ON YOUR FUCKING FINAL EXAM.”

It works. They flinch, they shift nervously in their seats, they put their cell phones down and close their browser windows and give him their full attention. Methos learned a long time ago that crazy trumps talented every time. He has screamed at kings and cattle, at prophets and soldiers and whores. College students are hardly a challenge.

“So,” he says, drifting away from the lectern and sitting on the edge of the table instead. “Kings die, cattle die, word-fame does not die. What did they mean by this?”

The girl in the front, the hair-twirler with the Ugg boots and shorts, puts up her hand. “The things you say, like, outlive you? Like the way there aren't any Vikings any more, but you still remember their proverb?”

And this is why Methos is here, why he gets up ridiculously early in the morning three days a week to work at a job that basically pays him peanuts. He flips through his seating chart until he finds her face. “Summer. Yes. Excellent. What do the rest of you think? In the back-- Abercrombie shirt-- Andrew? Yeah. Andrew. Kings and cattle. What did they mean by that?”

“Food?” Abercrombie says uncertainly. “You might starve, but, like--.”

“Interesting. Incorrect, though.” Five centuries ago at Oxford he might have hit someone for giving an answer so stupid. Now he cann't even call a kid borderline retarded without getting sued. He flips through his seating chart. “Poppy?”

A small, round girl, in the seat near the door. “Government,” she says. “The kings. And-- money?”

“Absolutely. Power and wealth. So, Andrew. Power and wealth don't last. Words do. Word-fame is forever. If you were going to tell a story, knowing it would outlive you, what would you talk about?”

“Myself,” Andrew says, and it gets a laugh.

“He's right,” Methos says, overriding them. “That's what most people are concerned with. The story of us. Our origins. Our future. Our present, our past. We were created on the seventh day, in the image of God. We received salvation from Christ, knowledge from Krishna. Or, we came over on the Mayflower, we threw tea in a harbor, we defeated the British, when in the course of human events--.”

They are watching him now, faces rapt, intent on what he is saying. Waiting to see if he'll throw one of the desks out the window or strangle someone, but it doesn't matter because they are listening. “Word-fame. We tell stories, we sing songs, we write books, and we remember, after the money has been spent and the kings have fallen and the world has moved on.”

Remembers, as he says it. Not a fire and the smell of horses and roasting meat, and a body warm under the blankets beside him, listening to a bard.

A man's voice, saying, “Kings die, or are murdered, empires fall, gods are forgotten.” Methos can remember the weight of his words, the strong German accent, the way the hot, bright African sun cast shadows on the tent floor. He can't remember the man's name, or his face. He didn't, at the time, judge it important enough to write down.

Most of Methos's life is like this: his memories are a series of moments like photographs, or fragments of video, seconds of audio. So much of it is gone, overwritten. The human brain was never meant to hold five thousand years of history. Even mortals forget more than they remember.

He sometimes thinks that that's why they invented words, a language to immortalize the things they've lost. And yet, there are no words he's ever learned that can describe taking a Quickening, or killing a woman or being fucked by a man or the feel of a fine horse under you on a cool morning in the grasslands.

He doesn't tell his first years that, because it's enough to get him drummed out of the English department. Instead he says, “Let's go back to our anonymous Viking, for a moment. He spoke a variant of Old Norse, which is an Indo-European language, just as English is. He was an educated man, more than likely-- literacy was common. And it's likely that he was a man. Viking women ran the households and did the farmwork and bore the children. They had a lot less time for proverbs and stories than the men did.”

Methos had been married to a Viking woman once. Brighid, with butter-colored hair wound round her head in a long thick braid. She'd been terrifying, without even trying. But there were no legends of her, and her way with a frying-pan-- no myths to explain how she'd born six fine sons to a man who couldn't sire children and went raiding purely to escape her.

“So. Kings die, cattle die, word-fame-- reputation-- is forever. Our Viking is a fighter, and he goes out and steals livestock and property, more or less everything he can carry, and destroys whatever he has to leave. And to commemorate his fun, he makes up poetry describing himself, big, strong and manly, beating his opponents to a pulp single-handedly or with a couple of loyal buddies, getting rich and moving up in the world.

“Or he tells stories about his family, his ancestors who were, as I'm sure you can imagine, also big and strong and awesome. And hey, maybe it's true, maybe they were pretty great, or maybe he was this little wimpy guy who got lucky. The point is, the things we know about him come from the stories told about him, that his descendants retold, until someone decided to write them down and they became history.

“Our Viking got his place in history-- or didn't get a place-- based on words. He made his own place, or he did something so amazing that other people wrote about it. Here's another ancient proverb for you,” Methos says, “one I'm sure you're all familiar with-- It's the winners who write the history books.”

He can't tell them how old that one is, because he doesn't know. He can remember Kronos saying it, in the ruins of a temple in a city with no name, and it was old even then.

“Traditionally the emphasis is on winners,” he says. “But maybe the emphasis should be on write. Ten centuries since our Viking lived, maybe; twenty since Rome and China discovered one another. Fifty centuries since they built the pyramids and domesticated the horse, fifty centuries since they learned how to write.”

Fifty centuries Methos can almost remember: it was when swords were bronze, not iron, and you beat a man to death before you hacked off his head and sometimes he healed before you severed his spinal cord. He chooses not to share this with the class.

“Everything we know-- not the things we theorize, based on archeological digs, or make up altogether because we like the sound of them-- our knowledge of the last fifty centuries comes from the things people thought were important enough to write down, or memorize and recite and pass down orally. Before that, it didn't matter who won, because their names died with them.”

And he doesn't know if he can remember that far back or not, because how do you put a date to a village beside a river, plowing in a field, hunting in a forest? If nothing happens, does time still pass?

“So,” he says, looking at Abercrombie Andrew, James who never meets anyone's eyes, at the hair-twirler and the skinny girl and the boy in the Sean John shirt, all the kids whose names he'll probably never learn, all the lives which will be short and painful and obscure, relatively speaking. “There are three kinds of people. Those who make history, and those who write about it.”

He waits for a hand to go up. “Summer?”

“What's the third kind?”

“I've forgotten about them,” Methos says. “Two pages, double-spaced, twelve point font, for Friday. Tell me your story. Make it up if you like.”


End file.
